Sadly, most people choose their beliefs about how the world works
the same way they choose most of their other actions: whatever makes
them feel good. Nowhere is this more evident than in the assumptions
of the Washington establishment about how to achieve peace between
Israel and the Palestinians. The core premise of this establishment is
that there is a 'peace process' and that if only this process could be
gotten right, peace would result.

Unfortunately, this is bald nonsense, and it is only believed because
it enables that establishment to stage a pantomime in which it is both
the audience and the hero. The myth of the peace process enables the
perfumed princes of Pennsylvania Avenue to go to sleep every night
confident that they are on the side of justice, reconciliation between
peoples, international understanding, anti-terrorism, democracy,
fairness, and, no doubt, Fukuyama's End of History, in which they have
an enormous emotional and intellectual investment, being devout
acolytes in the high church of globalism.

But in fact, history isn't ending, and anyone who bothers to consult
it will discover that in fact, not a single war in history has ever
been satisfactorily ended by a 'peace process,' and the very idea that
one might be reveals wishful thinking about the most basic facts of
international relations.

If one examines past wars that have been ended by 'peace' processes,
one discovers the endless shape-of-the-table negotiations about
Vietnam, to which table the North Vietnamese were only bombed back by
the B-52. Or the protracted negotiations that attended the Thirty
Years War, in which a third of the population of Germany was killed
and human flesh was sold for food in the markets of Frankfurt. Or a
dozen other shabby, brutal conflicts in which politicians fiddled
while civilians suffered. One does not discover peace.

These past conflicts have two things in common: one, the peace
processes prolonged them, and two, at least one party to the conflict
wanted to keep the fighting going. Surprise, surprise: wars go on when
at least one combatant wants them to. What is sad is that the
so-called 'peace' process, which is really nothing new, just a Madison
Avenue locution for historically unoriginal endless rounds of
negotiations, concessions, and negotiations, enables this to happen
under a veil of 'peace-loving' deceit. By now, we should be familiar
with the standard modus operandi of the left, which always cloaks its
most vicious violence in the language of benevolence. What's sad is
that an administration nominally on the right is perpetrating the same
fraud.

It is time to sweep away the delusion that there is a peace
process, and stop using this ridiculous propagandistic term, whose
twins in political discourse are such Orwellian nonsense phrases as
'revenue enhancer' and 'people's republic.' The so-called peace
process is just endless negotiation. Repeat: the so-called peace
process is just endless negotiation. That's it. Negotiation. No magic,
no political voodoo, and especially no mysticism about the value of
dialogue as an end in itself, which merely serves to prop up the
self-importance of the diplomats who engage in it.

The fundamental problem is this: peace is not a process.
Once we grasp firmly that a peace process is an imaginary animal and
we can look at what it really is in the hard light of political
realism, we can see why it is by nature both doomed and dangerous.

To understand why the
endless-negotiations-popularly-known-as-the-peace-process are a
dangerous joke, it is only necessary to ask a basic question from
Political Science 101: what are negotiations? Well, they're when two
parties are both involved in some situation that they both want
something out of. This is true whether it's two nations that are
negotiating, two corporations, two lawyers, or two peasants haggling
over potatoes. The fundamental basis of negotiation is the interests
of the negotiators, the fact that each side wants something. And the
substance of the negotiations is the process of each side offering the
other, 'I'll give you X if you give me Y,' and so forth. A deal is
struck when some outcome is found that both sides are prepared to
accept. If no such outcome can be found, no deal is struck.

The crucial point here is that negotiations don't have any force in
their own right; they only reflect the pre-existing desires of the
parties to the negotiations. It is true that negotiators can come up
with complicated deals with lots of intricacies and these intricacies
can change over time, but only insofar as they reflect the
fundamentals: each side wants something. Negotiations themselves
never, or rarely, have the power to change what people want.

And this 'rarely' is a straightforward empirical question: has each
side changed what it wants or not? If yes, then negotiations proceed
on the basis of the new desires of the participants. And perhaps this
enables the striking of a deal where no deal was possible before,
because it makes some outcome acceptable to one side that was
previously unacceptable. But if not, then nothing happens and conflict
is not resolved.

This is what the 'peace process' aims to do: find a deal where none
could be found before. Obviously, because of the logic we have just
reviewed, this can only happen if the peace process leads one or other
of the parties to change what they want. But that's it, and there is
no other way the peace process can do anything. It either has the
power to change the objectives of the Israelis and Palestinians, or it
doesn't. Period.

So, does the peace process have this power? Well, for a start, do the
parties to it say it has? (If they say so, we can be skeptical, but if
they don't, we know we haven't got a chance.) Well, no. The statements
of the Palestinian and Israeli leaderships make quite clear that on
the core fundamentals, they both want pretty much the same things they
always have. The Palestinians want to drive the Israelis into the sea,
and the Israelis want to not be driven into the sea.

More specifically: the Palestinians want a Right of Return that Israel
can't afford to give them, lest she be swamped demographically. The
Palestinians want Jerusalem, which the Jews have been dreaming about
for 2,000 years. The Palestinians want to continue waging
low-intensity terrorist warfare until they destroy all of Israel,
which naturally objects to signing a peace treaty after which war just
goes on as before.

So until someone actually finds a way to make the Israelis or the
Palestinians change their fundamental desires, negotiations aren't
going to achieve anything. And these fundamental desires are rooted in
basic existential needs, like national survival, or in bone-deep
cultural and ideological commitments that touch the very identities of
the communities concerned, so this is vanishingly unlikely.

This is all true independently of which side you think has the better
moral case. It is true because of what each side does want, not what
it ought to want or whether it deserves to get what it wants. Take the
Palestinian side if you like: the peace process still makes no sense.

I repeat: either the fundamental objectives of the two sides make an
agreement possible, or they don't. If they do, let them sign a treaty
tomorrow. If they do not, either find a way to change these objectives
or shut up. The vast paraphernalia of the peace process, from the
creation of the international crime syndicate known as the Palestinian
Authority to the releases of its capos from Israeli jails, can only
possibly make the tiniest bit of sense if it somehow contributes to
this change of objectives. But it obviously does not, the moment one
looks at it in this light.

What it does do is let everybody play: the Palestinian leadership
plays at having a country, the Americans play at being peacemakers,
the Europeans play at being champions of the oppressed, the Israeli
public plays at living in a normal country, and of course the
terrorists get back into their fun and games with Semtex and C-4. The
players may dislike, or even hate, each other, but they all love the
delusion. It is political onanism on a grand scale. It is a classic
case of the fact that when it comes to the Middle East, everybody,
both in it and outside it, prefers emotionally gratifying myths to
reality.

But the continual bloodletting makes this delusion extremely
expensive. It is also utterly cynical, because the Palestinian
leadership has no intention of really ending the terrorism, and
probably couldn't even in the bizarre circumstance that it abandoned
everything it has ever stood for and wanted to. The empty cease-fires
alone - which conform perfectly to the Moslem concept of hudna or
temporary and dishonest truce - prove that. This is all true whether
or not Mr. Arafat, or anybody else, is head of the Palestinian
Authority. Changes of personnel are a meaningless charade designed to
generate the illusion that now, at last, things will be different, so
we should all give the peace process one last chance.

This dynamic creates the need for endless iterations of change
designed to preserve the credibility of the concept of the peace
process. If the process doesn't work, then it must be because Israel
hasn't made enough concessions yet. (Nobody ever thinks it might be
the other side that hasn't made enough concessions because everyone
knows, like they know about racial differences behind closed doors,
that the Arabs are, in T.E. Lawrence's eternal description in Lawrence
of Arabia, 'a silly people, greedy, barbarous, and cruel,' and expect
nothing better from them.) Thus the price of the peace process
intrinsically escalates. We can call this 'concession inflation.'

The endless iterations of the peace process resemble the endless
varieties of socialism that successively captured the minds of the
intelligentsia from the 30's to the 90's. These ranged from Leninism
to Trotskyism to Stalinism to Maoism to Eurocommunism to
Yugo-communism to the mixed economy to the Swedish model to Zambian
Humanism and Ujamaa. Enormous suffering took place because no-one had
the guts to admit that the basic concept, socialism, was flawed. We
are seeing the same intellectual pathology repeat itself, and the only
real question is how many people must die before people figure this
out.

It is therefore time to simply abandon, openly and explicitly, the
peace process or anything like it. Permanently.

Once this is done, the Palestinians can be told that if they want to
make a deal, they should make a binding offer and be done with it. No
more endless 'process' about anything. They're either ready to make
peace or they're not. If it takes them another 40 years as a culture
to get to that point, so be it. But the rest of the world should not
be strung along with their playing at a peace they have no intention
of keeping.

As they say, the definition of stupidity is repeating the same
action and expecting a different result.

Robert Locke is a former editor at Front Page Magazine
(http.www.frontpagemag.com), where his articles are archived. These
include "Hobbes and the Middle East"
(http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=1245). He has
also been published in Vdare, Intellectual Capital, and The American
Conservative. His recent article defending population transfer can be
found on Vdare (see http://www.vdare.com/locke/palestinian_problem.htm).
He can be contacted at robert_locke_journalist@yahoo.com.